Obama bowed, people died

Obama is bowing to the leader of China! All is lost! We may as well put lead in our own toys!

To revisit a soon-to-be-old friend, Confederate Yankee of the 100+ deleted comments thinks Obama is an “unteachable buffoon” for this transgression.

So I couldn’t help myself, and now I’ve gotten involved in the comments of this post about Obama and bowing. At first, I thought it was just a silly thing to worked up over. But as I got deeper into the discussion with CY’s readers, I decided to give them a chance to show me their opinion was justified. I mean, if Obama’s bowing spree actually is making the rest of the world think we’re lap dogs, then he should really stop. But for my part, I wasn’t able to find any evidence on the web that anybody but conservatives actually think the bowing makes Obama look weak. I asked the CY commenters about this and all I got were repeated assertions about how bad it is that Obama bowed. My favorite commenter then argued back that if all these world leaders still respected Obama, why weren’t they bowing to him? Which caused me to (perhaps too) gleefully summarize. Self-quote:

A: I can’t believe Obama bowed!
B: Why does bowing matter?
A: Because then no one else respects him.
B: How do you know they don’t respect him?
A: Because they don’t bow!

If they finally come back with some real evidence, I’ll update this post. And perhaps do some bowing of my own!

UPDATE: I do feel compelled to point out that the wingers at CY finally presented some evidence that Obama’s earlier bow to the Japanese Emperor was seen as a gaffe by the Japanese. Here’s a good link about that. Of course, they couldn’t show that it was any more significant than a gaffe — that is, did it actually make them think Obama or America weak because of it? And I’m also less inclined to give them any credit for intellectual integrity since I’ve now been banned from the site.

UPDATE 2: You know, I actually just saw the video of the greeting, and it’s more of a nod than a bow. These guys are fucking idiots.